With the advent of the computer age, computer and software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help them write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. For example, modern electronic word processing applications allow users to prepare a variety of useful documents. Modern spreadsheet applications allow users to enter, manipulate, and organize data. Modern electronic slide presentation applications allow users to create a variety of slide presentations containing text, pictures, data or other useful objects.
To assist users to locate and utilize functionality of a given software application, a user interface containing a plurality of generic functionality controls is typically provided along an upper, lower or side edge of a displayed workspace in which the user may enter, copy, manipulate and format text or data. Such functionality controls often include selectable buttons with such names as “file,” “edit,” “view,” “insert,” “format,” and the like. Typically, selection of one of these top-level functionality buttons, for example “format,” causes a drop-down menu to be deployed to expose one or more selectable functionality controls associated with the top-level functionality, for example “font” under a top-level functionality of “format.”
Modern software applications allow users to apply a seemingly infinite number of formatting options combinations to a given document or object. For example, a text document may have many fonts, text sizes, heading formats, display/print settings, and the like. For another example, a picture object may be shaded, rotated, colored, resized, cropped, stylized, and the like. A typical user often has difficulty visualizing possible formatting options combinations, and even if the user can visualize an interesting and desirable formatting options combination, the user may lack the skill to select appropriate individual formatting options to create the desired format.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an improved user interface for displaying a gallery of images showing different formatting options combinations that may be applied to a selected object which when selected by a user cause the automatic application of a selected formatting options combination to a selected object. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.